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Jeff Sessions Has to Quit

Donald Trump gives a stunning vote of no confidence to one of his staunchest supporters.

On Wednesday, The New York Timespublished what it calls a "wide-ranging" interview of Donald Trump, which is an extremely charitable way of conveying the fact that the president of the United States sounds an awful lot like someone in the midst of a precipitous mental decline. He accuses James Comey of blackmail. He threatens Robert Mueller's job. He casually mentions that the FBI reports directly to the president, a statement that is so astonishingly far from the truth that trying to imagine how he could possibly think that gives me a headache. For God's sake, John McCain, who is the closest thing the Republican Party has right now to a senior statesman, was diagnosed with brain cancer last night, and somehow that was, at best, only the evening's sixth most shocking revelation.

The most baffling passage of all, though—and admittedly, this is a matter of opinion—was Trump's candid admission that he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General and the man who served as the inspiration for the guests at that Armitage family party in Get Out, had he known that Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation shortly thereafter. This didn't come as some veiled expression of disappointment with Sessions' conduct, either. Donald Trump flat-out said that he wished he had hired someone else.

TRUMP: Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.

BAKER: Was that a mistake?

TRUMP: Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.

HABERMAN: He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?

TRUMP: Zero. So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.

And later:

TRUMP: Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.

HABERMAN: You mean at the hearing?

TRUMP: Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t. He then becomes attorney general, and he then announces he’s going to recuse himself. Why wouldn’t he have told me that before?

This is astonishing. Sessions was one of Donald Trump's earliest supporters at a time when most Republican Party establishment figures treated him like a harmless sideshow who just wanted to yell in front of crowds and sell shitty ties. This loyalty earned him an appointment as Attorney General, the position that Sessions, a former state attorney general who was once upon a time denied a spot on the federal bench for being too racist, had probably eyed from the beginning. Now, his crime of recusing himself from the Russia investigation after his own related omissions and improprieties came to light—as any prosecutor would have a legal duty to do—has earned him this humiliating public excoriation.

It's not a great look for Donald Trump to be lashing out at Sessions like this, since asserting that you would not have hired someone if you had known at the time that they wouldn't cover your ass raises obvious questions about which parts, exactly, of your ass require coverage. But setting aside the intricacies of Robert Mueller's inquiry, I genuinely have no idea how Jeff Sessions can continue doing his job after receiving such a public vote of no confidence, and if he has even the tiniest shred of dignity remaining, he should resign immediately. Imagine if your boss, for some godforsaken reason, went to the press and outlined in painstaking detail the ways in which he or she believes that you're doing a godawful job. Would you report for duty as usual the next day and hope things get better? Why would you even bother?

For Sessions, the answer may simply be that he has nowhere else to go. (Sure enough, he offered a tepid response to Trump's comments this morning, pledging that he would continue to serve for "as long as that is appropriate," which mean... nothing.) His brand of casual bigotry masquerading as faux Southern gentility is now well outside the mainstream, but as Attorney General, he is free to pursue his pet projects with impunity, embracing outdated and discriminatory drug policies, keeping immigrants out of his country, and making it more difficult to vote vile men like him out of office. For Sessions, the only thing worse than being powerless is the prospect of being powerless and forgotten. Without his job, he'd be exposed for what he is: an old man with a brain from the '60s who deserves none of our time or attention.

If he stays on, he will do so as a craven sycophant who possesses zero authority and even less credibility. If he quits, and barring a last-minute push to run for his old Senate seat as an independent in December, his political career is over. Neither of these options is particularly appealing. But whichever one he chooses, Jeff Sessions is well on his way to becoming a political pariah who sold his soul for the chance to be the weakest and most feckless Attorney General in recent memory. May he wear the scarlet letter of his service in this fucked-up administration for however much longer he manages to remain relevant.

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